Past the distant treeline Malamute saw the cranes swinging big tubes of metal. But his pedestrian eyes were only good for initial, vague impressions. It was his snout that would tell him what he wanted to know. Malamute’s sense of smell was so fine-tuned he could could sniff from any random occurrence a level of factual detail equivalent to what a promising graduate-level scholar, engaging wholeheartedly in two-or-three days’ worth of research, could come up with. For example, a mere three sniffs into his snout-recon, Malamute knew without question that a real estate developer named Leonard Craltin—who had a sort of man crush on his Latino office intern, Phil Ricardo—had broken ground on an ambitious project to build a high-class movie theater smack in the middle of the farmyards, whether the farmers there were movie buffs or not. A fourth sniff told him that Mr. Craltin had, earlier today, bullied Farmer Mongol into selling his land at a cutthroat price. Malamute didn’t like where all of this was heading, so he took a really really big breath and then, as he did on rare occasions, sniffed clear into the future, instinctively translating into usable data the inscrutable scents that swirled on the horizon. And so that’s how he discovered that Mr. Craltin would, having connived Farmer Mongol out of his land, next come to Malamute’s own employer, Farmer Jert; and would bully him into selling his poor excuse for a farm. And then poor Malamute would be out of a job, likely to get scooped up by a catcher and brought to a high security pound for dogmen. Malamute couldn’t bare to sniff any more after that. It was too stinky.